2006.02.19

The shawl is pinned out and drying on top of the freezer downstairs. It's only sprayed to dampness, so I'm hoping it won't take too long to dry even though the basement is on the nippy side. I may kick up the heat slightly (horrors!) to help it along.

2006.02.08

I finished knitting the shawl last night with a mere four inches of yarn to spare. Even though the brief was to use just one skein of yarn, I think when I write out the pattern, I'll mark the body end two rows sooner than I actually stopped. It will be much safer to have an extra 1500+ stitches worth of yarn before tackling the edging, especially when you consider that the whole concept of measuring gauge in lace gives Heisenberg a run for his money. (And I will encourage the use of lifelines towards the end and even more frequently for habitual stitch-droppers!)

But I am very pleased with the shawl's appearance, even in its unblocked state. It's an elegant 100g frippery, particularly for evening wear. Tomorrow morning, I'll pin it out on a blocking board on the chest freezer (the freezer came to me in an aha! moment as one of the few cat-proof flat surfaces in the house) and use the hand steamer to set it.

2006.02.07

I'm at two different personal terror alerts today. On the critter front, we got to a full Elmo when the second part of my King Arthur order arrived via FedEx Ground. I heard the knock on the door and went to get the box. Since it contained a couple of large flour buckets, it was bulky, and I needed to open the door wide to bring it in. Unfortunately, the delivery guy was still walking across the front yard to the truck across the street. The idiot Cookie decided to bolt after him, something she's never done in the decade she's been here - apparently the Keeshond code, which dictates that all strangers must be greeted, overrode all her previous behavior. Now, my street has a posted 40 mph speed limit, which most drivers interpret as a bare minimum, so there's me running after Cookie in my slippers in the snow, yelling first at the dog and then at the driver to stop. The driver did, Cookie caught up to him, and I nabbed her just at the road's edge. Oy.

The fiber terror level is between Bert and Ernie. (And isn't that a position to scare the wingnuts? Just add Tinky-Winky to send them over the edge!) I'm on the fourth edge of the shawl, and there's not much yarn left. I think it's just barely enough, but I don't wanna have to rip back to the beginning of the lifeline. Think good thoughts as I knit onwards ...

I'm having fun with the bread machine. I programmed a sourdough starter cycle and a sourdough bread cycle. It's definitely the bread machine for geeks!

2006.02.04

I haven't done anything with the shawl in a week, which is particularly sad since I was half way around the edge. Instead, I had to put on my programmer hat to kick the database project into higher gear. Plus, one of my external hard drives had a hissy fit the other day, and I've been restoring a very large iTunes library from backups. Nothing has been lost, but retrieving the offsite backups and verifying everything takes time.

On the bright side, my new bread machine, an early birthday present from my parents, arrived late yesterday. It's also a Zo, but programmable, and the first loaf is in the oven now. The next test is to see how it does pasta. I suspect I'll have to make a bigger batch because of the rectangular bucket shape, but fresh pasta is easy to freeze or share.